Using sensei with raspa_gpio

Elk Audio OS Sensei
1

I was trying to understand how to use sensei with the raspa_gpio hardware frontend. The description sounds perfect to connect to a Raspberry PI pico as a controller for the hardware.

However there is not much mentioned about how it connects to the controller in
https://elk-audio.github.io/elk-docs/html/documents/sensei_configuration_format.html

When starting sensei with “raspa_gpio” hw frontend I get the follwoing error:

[2023-04-07 17:30:05.371] [error] [gpio_hw_socket] Failed to connect to Gpio Hw socket: No such file or directory
[2023-04-07 17:30:05.371] [warning] [gpio_hw_frontend] Failed sending packet to hw backend
[2023-04-07 17:30:05.621] [warning] [gpio_hw_socket] Sending packet on socket failed -1, Attempting to reconnect to socket..,

reading a the source code I found that it tries to connect to a socket on /tmp/raspa

However, I could not figure out which component would then be on the other side of the socket. Would it be possible to communicate via SPI to a microcontroller?

2

Hi @laenzi ,
the SENSEI driver was developed specifically for the (now out-of-production) Elk Pi board:

The SPI was used to just control some shift registers there.

It could be theoretically possible to modify the driver / Sensei to work with another microcontroller, though that will require quite significant changes to the RTDM driver.

3

Ok, thanks for the info, I will continue with the midi communication then.